The research that Tax Justice Network published yesterday morning on tax evasion is, I think, shocking. The full report is here. I’ve posted a summary table of tax evasion for 145 countries too.

The real question is why does this matter? What’s the problem with the UK losing £69.9bn a year to tax evaders?

What’s the problem with Italy losing €183bn a year as a result of its 27% shadow economy – a shadow economy of the same size as that in Greece and more than twice the size of that in the UK?
The answer is that it matters for three reasons.

The first is that we wouldn’t have a world economic crisis now if we hadn’t had tax evasion. The current crisis focuses on the Euro. Italy is at its epicentre. It has external debt of €1.9 trillion. If only it had suffered the UK’s rate of evasion in the last decade then its deficit would be less than half that sum now.

The same would also be true for Greece, and only slight less so for Spain. In other words, if tax evasion in these countries had been taken seriously and been tackled in these countries we would not have a Euro crisis today. That’s how important tax evasion is.

Something similar could be said for the UK. The USA has an evasion rate about two thirds that of the UK. If we had reduced our tax evasion rate to US levels in the last decade we might owe £200 billion less in debt now.

Secondly, cuts of more than £20 billion a year could be avoided in the UK economy now with our debt still being tackled at the current rate. That could prevent most of the current stress in the NHS; sixth formers would still have maintenance allowances and we might not be facing a national strike next week. We wouldn’t need cuts if we tackled it.

Perhaps as important as either of those is, however, the long term impact of tax evasion. When tax evasion is widespread, and that’s obviously true in Greece and Italy but it’s also becoming the case in the UK too, then honesty goes out of the window.

No one can succeed running an honest business. Corruption becomes endemic. And with that all prospects for investment in growth, wealth creation, public goods, our future, the elderly, the young and the disadvantaged disappear too. In other words, tax evasion creates poverty.

Reader comments

Debt and deficit are not the same thing. This author confuses them. To clarify:

– Deficit is the amount by which a government’s spending exceeds its income

– Debt is the accumulated borrowing arising from running deficits over succeeding years. In the case of the UK we still have debt arising from the First World War!

Italy has a large amount of debt but at the moment no deficit – it is running a primary surplus, though admittedly a very small one.

Improving tax take by reducing tax evasion might well reduce the deficits that various European countries are running, but it wouldn’t eliminate their debt. Nor would they want it to. Government debt in most countries is owned to a large extent by their people, in the form of pensions and other savings. That is certainly true in Italy.

Is the author assuming that Germany and the Netherlands have no tax evasion problem, since both are running fiscal surpluses? Germany does have debt slightly higher than the UK’s but a lot of that is because it is still bearing the costs of reunification, it is of course the main funder of the bailout packages already paid, and it is the main provider of capital to the ECB.

The notion that we wouldn’t have a Euro crisis if there hadn’t been tax evasion is simply wrong. The underlying problem in the Eurozone is a balance of payments problem exacerbated by excessive bank lending from surplus countries to poorer ones. If Greece and others had taken more in taxes they would simply have spent more and ended up in the same situation.

“What’s the problem with the UK losing £69.9bn a year to tax evaders? ”

The UK doesn’t lose £68.9 billion a year to tax evaders. It’s possible that The Treasury does, even that the Government finances do, but not the UK as a whole. For the country isn’t the government now, is it?

That tax which is evaded (which is naughty, illegal etc, yes) still circulates in the economy, still feeds, clothes and houses people.

“Italy is at its epicentre. It has external debt of €1.9 trillion. If only it had suffered the UK’s rate of evasion in the last decade then its deficit would be less than half that sum now. ”

This is the third time now that you’ve made these howlers.

Italy exernal debt: €1.9 trillion, yes. Italy government debt, €1.9 trillion, yes. But that these two very different things are around the same number is simply happenstance.

External debt is all debt owed by Italians to non-Italians. Households, companies, banks and government.

Government debt is all debt owed by the Italian government to all people….banks, households, foreigners and Italians. The government external debt isn’t anything like €1.9 trillion. Actually, if you bother to look it up, the Bank of Italy says it’s €825 billion. And that is the external debt which could be ameliorated by reducing tax evasion. Although of course Italian households etc might owe more as a consequence of borrowing to pay their taxes….who knows?

Yes, this really is important. Someone who wants to lecture us on economics should know the difference between external debt (influenced more by trade deficits/surpluses than anything else) and government debt (the accumulated difference between taxing and spending by government over the years).

The other howler is the use of the word deficit. Deficit is the annual difference between government income and expenditure. The $1.9 trillion is the national debt, the accumulated balance of all of that. Italy’s deficit wouldn’t be half what it is now if here were no tax evasion (actually, it would be in healthy, excessively healthy, surplus) although the national debt might be.

And as ever, Richard is ignoring the most basic economics. We all knowthat if you tax something you get less of it. So, if all currently tax evading actiities were in fact taxed there wouldn’t be as much activity. You simply cannot project average tax rates out over untaxed economic actions: because some/many of thse economic activities simply will not exist if you tax them.

Tax avoiders are crooks. Nothing more ,nothing less. They are stealing from the rest of us who allow society to be organised in a way that they can make lots of money.

The alternative is we boil them in oil. They should be delighted that they are permitted to get rich. And all the usual whining from the usual tricke down trolls is the same old failed Adam Smith clap trap.

Er, no, Sally. Tax EVADERS are crooks. On that we all agree. Tax AVOIDERS are people who pay the minimum tax they are legally obliged to pay. That is, er, most of us, I think – and certainly one Richard Murphy. By all means boil tax evaders in oil, but if you do the same to tax avoiders there won’t be many people left.

This is a man who likes to disparage unrealistic “blackboard economics” making a claim, one presumes about reality, that would only be true if all that happened was the extra tax is collected, there was no effect on the level of economic activity, and when the government finds itself flush with extra revenue, it does not amend its taxation policies nor its expenditure.

Are these herculean efforts to avoid paying tax tantamount to law breaking – hard to say as only a tiny minority of uber-specialists understand the rules governing such activity – and I suspect that’s just how the big earners would like to keep it?

The first is that we wouldn’t have a world economic crisis now if we hadn’t had tax evasion. The current crisis focuses on the Euro. Italy is at its epicentre. It has external debt of €1.9 trillion. If only it had suffered the UK’s rate of evasion in the last decade then its deficit would be less than half that sum now.

No. It is impossible to plumb the depths of a Richard Murphy article in a single life time, but of course the mistake here is obvious. The Italians do not have so much debt because they are all avoiding taxes. The government has so much debt because they are fiscally incontinent. There is not some fixed amount of money that the Italian government *had* to spend, not one penny more nor one penny less. Giving them more money is like giving a drunk more beer. We all know what will happen to it, is it just a matter of which wall gets how much. If the Italian government had collected all that tax, I expect there would be a few more happy Bunga Bunga girls. There certainly would not be lower deficits or lower levels of government debt.

The Germans do not have such debt problems because, by and large, they do not spend what they do not have. At least not to the same extent. Most Western governments work out how much money they have and then distribute it to their favoured clients. The Italians worked out how much cash they had and how much some fool would lend them and then distributed that to their favoured clients. If they got more, they would have handed out more. If they got less they would have handed out less. Indeed a sensible argument could be made that it was tax evasion that put off this day for so long. If Italians had been dumb enough to pay their taxes, the government would have blown even more cash.

If we had reduced our tax evasion rate to US levels in the last decade we might owe £200 billion less in debt now.

Or we would have another three Domes. Or maybe another Race Relations Tribunal. Or perhaps we would have continued with Nimrod a bit longer. What we would not be is less in debt. Given we are about as fiscally incontinent as the Italians, it is just that the bond market has not noticed yet.

Perhaps as important as either of those is, however, the long term impact of tax evasion. When tax evasion is widespread, and that’s obviously true in Greece and Italy but it’s also becoming the case in the UK too, then honesty goes out of the window.

That is putting the cart before the horse. Where honesty goes out the window there is tax evasion. Or more to the point, when people know the government will waste or steal their money, as with the British government in recent times, they are less inclined to pay tax. Rightly. If they do not treasure our every penny, I don’t see we have an obligation to give them a farthing.

Taxation is, ultimately, voluntary. They can’t make us pay if we don’t want to. Which is why Richard would be better placed insisting that our money is spent well and so restoring trust between rulers and ruled, rather than banging on about his obsession to which end no amount of quoting himself is ever enough.

Of course the boundary between avoidance and evasion can become somewhat blurred…..but you can’t therefore assume that everyone who is organising their affairs to minimise their tax is breaking the law.

[13] “Of course the boundary between avoidance and evasion can become somewhat blurred” – especially when an army of highly paid specialist accountants, (employed by corporations) spend most of their waking hours dreaming up new and exciting ways to bend the rules?

The activity of finding ways of avoiding tax may be immoral but it is not illegal. What constitutes immoral behaviour is a value judgement on which people are entitled to disagree. What constitutes illegal behaviour is a matter for the courts.

[16] I wasn’t so much thinking about morality, rather the fact matters which can only be settled by uber specialists makes it nigh in possible (for 99.9% of the population) to know if the law is being observed or not.

It’s like the old joke about the law – winning depends on having the best lawyer.

I think the illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the illicit government funded, black market trade in smack and oil should be of concern but if it’s backed by the government, oh well then, it’s fine. How very nieve.

a&e nurse – and the statist response is to enact more and more legislation. It is a bit like the war on drugs. It never occurs to the statist mindset to define tax in a way that cannot be evaded or avoided – eg a land value tax. We know how much land there is. We know who owns it. Thus it is simple to tax and collect. Instead we have 1000s of pages of legislation defining income (and earned income for income tax purposes is different to earned income for naional insurance purposes), capital gains, what goods and services are chargeable for VAT etc etc – each tax with its own separately defined mass of allowances, exemptions and reliefs. In a shambles such as that, the lawyer is king. To cure tax evasion and avoidance, simplify the system.

Indeed. Which makes it essential that HMRC know what they are doing, and that companies report accurately. Not arguing with that. But even more, it makes the case for simplification of tax. The more complex tax is, and the more “official” tax exemptions there are, the larger the industry dedicated to avoiding it will be.

There are only 4 countries in Murphy’s list that have shadow economies representing less than 10% of their respective GDPs:

– Austria
– Luxembourg
– The United States, and
– Switzerland

Those are closely followed by:

– China (Hong Kong), and
– Singapore

And before the red brigades start shouting that the low ratio is all down to the alleged misbehaviours of these countries’ banks, etc. remember that Murphy measures (or at least tries to) domestic tax evasion, ie. committed by the country’s own residents. It means that if, for instance, UK residents fail to report and pay taxes due on assets held in Switzerland, this would be captured in the UK’s ratio, not Switzerland’s.

So Murphy’s brilliant number-crunching has demonstrated conclusively, unequivocally, irrefutably that the countries thanot only have very low levels of taxation but also most guarantee privacy and protect from government interference in private financial matters, are those that are ALSO the most successful at limiting the size of their shadow economy and mitigating tax evasion.

In short, the fewer reasons people have to cheat, the less they do.

Well done Murphy. We have been telling you this for years, but it is great to see that you have finally reached these conclusions on your own.

If we had reduced our tax evasion rate to US levels in the last decade we might owe £200 billion less in debt now.

If a state isn’t collecting tax for whatever reason (avoidance, evasion, or low tax rates, or whatever) should it not reduce its spending?

If say there is loads of tax evasion in Fnordia why doesn’t “the government say, “OK, you can’t have your new state swimming pools and libraries and hospitals. There is too much tax evasion at £100bn a year and we just can’t afford it.”

26
I would imagine that the people who avoid/evade tax are most unlikely to use state swimming pools or care much that there are no new schools or hospitals, it’s those who can’t afford their own who will suffer.

I would imagine that the people who avoid/evade tax are most unlikely to use state swimming pools or care much that there are no new schools or hospitals, it’s those who can’t afford their own who will suffer.

I am sure. And there’s the problem with the social contract. You have to make a case to those who don’t use state swimming pools that they should pay for others pleasure and well being. Can you? At the moment the Left seems to be about as sophisticated as a teenage mugger – they say give us the cash or we will kill you and that is about it. Can you give me one single reason why anyone should pay for the swimming pools of others?

Just to check when Sally describes tax avoiders as brownshirts, does she accuse these people of fascism?

Pensioners who have investments in ISAs
Firms who use environmentally efficient cars
Households who invest in wind turbines on their roofs
Companies that invest in British manufacturing (ie build a factory)
People who buy Christmas Presents for each other
A married couple (simply by virtue of being married)

All those activities avoid tax in some way- the ISA is untaxed, the environmental car gets a Capital Allowance, the wind turbine gets a benefit, the factory was in receipt of IBAs, the presents are not subject to tax and the married couple have no inheritance tax liability.

Therefore Sally thinks everyone who is environmentally friendly, has an ISA, gets married, builds a factory and buys a Christmas Present is a Nazi- I’ve seen some ludicrous accusations on the web before, but the idea that getting married opens up Autschwitz is pure comedy gold.

“Can you give me one single reason why anyone should pay for the swimming pools of others?”
There really only is one reason, but it is a big one… society.

Without a healthy and well adjusted people to be your customers and workers, co-workers, and friends (though if you horde money so much can a person really have a true friend…). When Philip Green can staff hundreds of shops, police those shops against crime, put out any fires, and single-handedly perform hundreds of other essential social services that every business depends upon Philip still won’t have a case for not paying his fair, and somewhat-democratically agreed, share of tax because he’ll still depend upon the state looking out for the customers he’ll need.

Abstractions are only useful to me in so far as I can use them (I’m terrible at pure math, and good with applied math). So, I tend to want to know people’s solutions up-front, or to extrapolate what will happen if their philosophy gets applied.

In this case, it’s pretty obvious by now that simple tax reform won’t so much…but neither is there the public appetite for massive changes to the basic tax rates. So, the best solution is surely to force the exceptions to the current regime back to the drawing board…MANY of them can only be justified on “but it’s been this way for x years”, and thus should be ended.

Better, if it turns out that we really CAN stop a lot of the more egregious avoidance and evasion, the rates can be dropped.

(I’m sure things like actual capital investment, ISA’s and a degree of pension tax refunds can be justified in terms of “avoidance”, but not a LOT of the more complex corporate schemes)

Some tax dodging is illegal. Some isn’t (thanks to loopholes carefully built into legislation to allow it). Tax dodgers like to deflect criticism towards the “grey economy” and away from the real beneficiaries of general taxation greyness – those taking advantage of tax havens and all the other carefully constructed dodges. But the fact is that dodging tax is anti social, and there are still plenty of principled people who see it that way, and do not turn “a blind eye” because “everybody does it”. We don’t.

It’s also the (secular) morality: those corporations and individuals who are evading such massive sums are set free, while benefit claimants are demonised and have the rates cut. It’s just wrong for this to happen, and for small time ‘benefit fraudsters’ imprisoned.

What society? Britain used to be a community. But mass immigration and failed education policies have put paid to that. The underclass feel nothing for everyone else except a certain predatory ferociousness. Why should we pay for anything except prisons?

Without a healthy and well adjusted people to be your customers and workers, co-workers, and friends (though if you horde money so much can a person really have a true friend…). When Philip Green can staff hundreds of shops, police those shops against crime, put out any fires, and single-handedly perform hundreds of other essential social services that every business depends upon Philip still won’t have a case for not paying his fair, and somewhat-democratically agreed, share of tax because he’ll still depend upon the state looking out for the customers he’ll need.

Unfortunately Britain is no longer producing healthy and well adjusted people is it? It is producing ferals. I am sure that for his tax payments, Philip Green could do all that. Fair? What evidence is there that he is not paying his fair share? Again, you simply come back to the logic of the mugger – Green needs to pay or you will hurt him. Great. But not convincing. Certainly does nothing to in any way encourage me to pay my taxes. Invest in shotguns, yes. But not taxes.

Leon, the UK is home to loads of immigrants. Your family were immigrants (is that about 200 or 100 or 50 years ago?). My family were immigrants 500 years ago, whatever. Other people wish to live in the UK.

“Moreover, they are heavily concentrated in London. 98%+ in most of the rest of the country is not racially pure enough for you, is it.”

I write this post from Leicester, which will be the first UK city that achieves a plurality of non-White population.

Sally, as usual, contributes with her nuanced commentary. Please look in a mirror – you are the archetypal ‘brown-shirt’. Your comments betray a profound malevolence, and frequently violence. You demonise so-called ‘trolls’, but you fail to realise that you are one yourself.

As for Murphy, does anyone actually expect him to make sense these days? His articles are so blinded my his quasi-religious fervour that they only really pay lip service to reality, and to the lives of nornal people. His articles are like the febrile dictates of cruel socialist despot in his final years, indifferent to suffering and death, clinging to his utopian dream. Thankfully, Ritchie has no such power to promote his illiberal vision – he is a retired accountant masquerading as an economist (one who makes such basic errors as confusing debt with deficit) whose particular brand of socialism is used to supply an artifice of legitimacy to the policies of the TUC. The Unions, and perhaps UKUncut, might take his word as the literal truth like so many Southern Baptists interpret Genesis, but the even mildly informed have learnt to derive amusement from his writings rather than information or analysis.

I seem to remember that a certain company called tax research UK run by a certain Richard Murphy was structured in such a way as toi minimise or avoid tax.

Practice what you preach Richie.

People might also want to note that most tax EVASION comes from the shadow and grey economies – peopleb getting paid cash in hand and not declaring it. HMRC and the government do have stats so$ewhere on it which you can download.

OK economists, is this a valid analogy? If I develop a new drug that is chemically different but reacts with the human body in exactly the same way as cocaine, I have committed no crime as it is not actually controlled by the Misuse of Drugs Act. The authorities then hurriedly amend the MDA to catch my new moneyspinner because of the massive social harm this highly addictive heath destroying yet utterly legal substance is capable of causing. If tax avoidance is legal, isn’t this a failure of political will and evidence that the current government sides with and enables the avoider? After all, they can outlaw my new drug with the stroke of a pen, should they so chose…

I think that’s a very simplistic analogy. The MDA creates a finite list of prohibited substances. As you say, all they have to do is add the new substance to the list if it’s not already covered by the legal definition for cocaine. Tax avoidance usually consists of strucutirng one’s affairs to take advantage of various allowances/exemptions which the legislator has seen fit to include to promote some form or activity. Or it may consist in exploiting the difference between tax regimes for legal and natural entities – differences which are there for other reasons. Too add such and such a ‘loop’ to a proscribed list is difficult to do without having adverse effects or even reversing a deliberate tax policy. You need a better analogy to win this argument.

The list of prohibited substances in the MDA isn’t finite. It is constantly expanded as criminal ingenuity develops new and distinct chemical formulae to circumvent it. Ecstacy, mexican mushrooms and miu miu were not originally proscribed.

It may be simplistic, BSTT, but tell me how the lack of the law evolving to meet the attempts to circumvent it in tax evasion differs from the rather robust evolutionary process in the control of drugs other than a failure of legislative will?